Every adventure has an origin story.
Here’s mine.
When I was ten, I went on a family holiday with a suitcase full of books. One for every day. Barely any clothes. My parents didn’t know whether to be proud or worried. I was just being practical.
I grew up in Sligo, on the wild west coast of Ireland, where Atlantic storms roll in and the stories are as layered as the landscape. Reading wasn’t a hobby for me. It was how I made sense of the world. And the older I got, the more I became convinced that stories aren’t just entertainment. They shape how we see each other. They can challenge what we take for granted. They can open doors that nothing else can.
That conviction turned into a degree in English Literature and Anthropology at Maynooth University, then a Master’s. After that, I took my adventures to the southern hemisphere for a while, living, working, and exploring before coming back to pursue a PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick
When teaching changed everything
By the time I finished my PhD, I knew that understanding stories wasn’t enough. I wanted to help other people see what I could see.
That’s exactly what happened when I started lecturing at Warwick. I discovered that what I loved most wasn’t just analysing stories. It was helping other people understand what made them work. Watching a student suddenly grasp why a character arc matters, or how point of view shapes everything, or why representation isn’t just a nice-to-have but a craft issue that makes stories more powerful. That was the spark.
I taught for over a decade at universities across the UK and Ireland: fiction, literary theory, gender and postcolonial studies, cultural theory. I gave guest lectures in the US, Canada, Germany, Austria, Spain, Norway, and Ireland. I published academic books and journal articles. I won the Times Higher Education Award for Excellence and Innovation in the Arts.
And through all of it, the thing that kept pulling me forward was the same thing that made me pack all those books as a ten-year-old: the belief that stories matter. That how we tell them matters. That the stories on our shelves shape how we see the world, and that we can do better.
A new chapter
Then, in the way that life sometimes does, everything shifted.
I moved to Norway with my partner. We started a family. I watched my children fall in love with stories the way I had. And I realised that the work I wanted to do next wasn’t in a lecture hall. It was on the page, one manuscript at a time.
In 2024, I founded Novel Adventure Editorial.
The name is a deliberate pun, and yes, I am absolutely that person. But it’s more than that. It’s my conviction that writing a book is an adventure and working with an editor who sees the potential in your story before you can? That’s the beginning of something extraordinary.
What learning Norwegian taught me about your courage
Here’s something I don’t talk about often enough.
Eight years ago, I moved to Norway. I’d lived in other countries before, but this was different. As a lecturer in English literature, I went from being the person in the room who could take language apart and put it back together to not being able to order a coffee.
At my language class, my teacher told me that my vocabulary wasn’t bad, but my grammar was terrible. She wasn’t wrong. And honestly, I can see the funny side.
Learning a language from scratch didn’t just take perseverance. It took a willingness to sound foolish. To mangle sentences in front of shopkeepers and friends. To say the wrong word at exactly the wrong moment and watch someone try very hard not to laugh. If I’d waited until I could speak competently, I’d never have spoken at all.
Eight years on, my Norwegian is a lot better, but I still hear my own mistakes. There’s a gap between what I want to say and what comes out of my mouth. My eldest, who is effortlessly fluent in both languages, regularly corrects my pronunciation. With great authority and zero mercy. Reading Norwegian bedtime stories aloud, I can hear he’s right.
It’s not just language, either. It’s culture. To an outsider, it seems like every Norwegian can ice skate and ski from birth. I grew up on the Irish coast doing watersports: surfing, swimming, and sailing in the Atlantic. I was confident in the water. It was home. Now I’m the one wobbling like Bambi on a frozen rink while small children whizz past me, and learning to cross-country ski with the kind of determination and awkwardness that only an adult beginner can muster.
I think about all of this when I work with writers. The gap between what you want to say and what makes it onto the page. The frustration of knowing what good storytelling sounds like but not quite being able to get there yet. The vulnerability of being a beginner when you’re used to being capable.
That takes real courage. And it’s part of why I bring so much care to the work we do together.
Qualifications
• PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, UK
• MA in Narrative and Modernity, Maynooth University, Ireland (First Class)
• BA (Hons.) English Literature & Anthropology, Maynooth University (First Class)
• Associate Fellow, Higher Education Authority, UK
• Member, Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA)
• Pro and Industry Judge, Writing Battle
• Developmental Editing: Fiction Theory & In Practice (Liminal Pages)
• Authenticity Reading, Developmental Editing of Fiction, The Art of Feedback (EFA)
• Times Higher Education Award for Excellence and Innovation in the Arts (2012)
Pronouns: she/her
What your story gains from 20 years in fiction
Today, I help writers transform their passion for storytelling into well-crafted, socially conscious fiction. I bring two things to every manuscript: deep practical expertise in writing craft, grounded in 20 years of teaching fiction, and specialist knowledge in inclusive storytelling, drawn from training in gender and postcolonial studies and a background in anthropology. I call it the dual lens approach.
When I’m not reading your manuscript
I live in Oslo with my partner and two young children. When I’m not reading, editing, or explaining the difference between showing and telling for the thousandth time (and still finding it genuinely exciting), you’ll find me outdoors. In summer, hiking forest trails and swimming in the fjords. In winter — and I’m happy to say this — you’ll find me ice skating and skiing.
I’m a member of the Editorial Freelancers Association, a Pro and Industry Judge for Writing Battle, and an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Authority.
And I still believe stories have the power to change the world.
If you’re working on a story that matters to you, I’d love to hear about it.